About a decade ago or so I went to a Jewel concert, which had been her first in several years, as she was touring with Matchbox 20 lead singer Rob Thomas in support of her album Goodbye Alice In Wonderland. The album itself was prompted by a perceived crisis of identity after Jewel felt she had sold out by releasing the dance pop-oriented 0304, her last gold album to date. Likely as a result of that feeling, she did not play in her concert near Tampa the two songs of hers that are my favorite of her body of work, This Way’s “Standing Still,” which expressed the sort of dissatisfaction that led her to switch her career when “Serve The Ego” hit #1 on the dance chart shortly after the song was itself released as a successful single, and “Stand,” a socially conscious dance pop song from the aforementioned 0304 album. Artists are often sensitive and temperamental people, and the two songs of hers that I appreciated so much, largely because of my own taste in irony and my own deep veins of restlessness likely reminded her of unhappy times that she wanted to forget, being viewed as a sort of mildly unconventional sex symbol. It is understandable why she would feel uncomfortable about that. At any rate, I still ponder from time to time those particular songs and what they mean when it comes to standing, whether one wants to make a move in life, or whether one wants to make a stand in defense of one’s principles or in defense of those who are being taken advantage of.

This weekend, I spent the night after a busy Sabbath [1] over at the house of some friends of mine, which is my temporary home away from home during the weeks when my other visits the area. Among the more humorous aspects of the night was the fact that I did not end up going to sleep until about 1:30AM, largely because I had been writing and a blog while simultaneously chatting with one of the young ladies of the family, who was sitting on the same couch where her mother was sleeping, a couch that was close to the bed where I was going to sleep myself. For various reasons, I was deeply unwilling to fall asleep while a teen girl and a woman separated from her husband were nearby, a sensitivity that is hopefully easy to understand and appreciate, and so despite the fact that I was tired I was unable to sleep in such circumstances. For reasons that are perhaps less obvious, I was also unwilling to wake up the sleeping woman and tell her and her daughter that they needed to leave the room so that I could sleep in peace. This is not an isolated problem; it is quite difficult for me to tell people to go away or to stop talking in general, and exiting awkward or unpleasant situations is something that has long been very difficult for me unless I had somewhere else to go that could be used as a justification for a quicker than expected departure from anywhere I happen to be. No matter how often I hear from others that it is perfectly alright to tell someone to go away, it is a matter of particular difficulty for me to do so [2].

There are various reasons why this is the case, but they are vexing to solve, and difficult even to fully define. Throughout the entire course of human history, for example, the vexing consequences of prolonged exposure to trauma have been recognized and noted, in the Bible, for example. Yet they did not have a name until the time after the Vietnam War, just in time to serve as an unpleasant but painfully accurate diagnosis of my own particular state. The burden between what is felt and what can be communicated is often a deeply oppressive one for me personally. I can write far more fluently and far more easily than I can speak, and so characteristically I write what is too awkward for me to speak verbally, no matter how deeply uncomfortable or unpleasant I feel about something. Those who do not see what I write will likely never see beneath the threshold of what is unpleasant or uncomfortable, because however eloquent or transparent my body language will be, I am largely unable to speak of it. And so I deal with it by writing about it at length, in the hope that it will be read and responded to in an appropriate manner [3]. Sometimes this hope is realized, and sometimes it is not. Had I been communicating by text with either of the people who were on the couch near my bed for the night, it would have been a small thing to write a note expressing I was tired and wanted to sleep, but I simply could not say it, no matter how fervently it was felt. Nor is this an isolated experience, but rather one that happens again and again in the course of life, where I am simply unable to convey to others the depth of how I feel about something, whether for good or for ill, in language that is appropriate to the situation. And so I leave a great deal to writing, which lacks the tone and nonverbal communication that would ideally be expressed in person but which cannot overcome my intense native restraint.

In the end, I suppose it is as Jewel sings when she tosses off the poetry of “so much violence ends in silence.” When one spends enough of life not having one’s words listened to or one’s feelings regarded, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate with others, or to know what people will actually pay attention to what is said and act accordingly. Ironically enough, this was an explicit part of my conversation this weekend that kept me up so late, when the young lady talking to me recognized that my communication tends to be far more indirect and implicit than that of most people and is simply not often taken with the proper level of seriousness that is meant. It is all the more ironic that even those people who know the rather heavily dampened levels of my verbal communication, and who may even find a great deal of enjoyment at figuring out the layers of implicit communication that are buried underneath seemingly casual remarks still find it unable to understand what I am trying to say, perhaps because it is so enjoyable to chat at length that one does not want to engage in the far more mundane tasks of sleeping. If those who know the rules, and can recite them, cannot act by them because they enjoy conversation too much and I simply cannot tell them to get lost when I really need to go to sleep, what hope is there for the great mass of humanity that neither knows nor cares about my well-being or the way that I manage to cope with life? What hope is there that a still small voice may be heard in the midst of the storm of loud and boisterous words?

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2016/04/03/all-over-creation/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/dont-leave-until-they-throw-you-out/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/last-one-out-is-a-rotten-egg/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/dinner-club-time-machine/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/06/14/a-walk-in-the-park/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/08/12/i-am-loath-to-close/

[3] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/05/16/a-form-of-self-medication/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent-but-not-the-ability/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/bloggers-gonna-blog/